TOBIAS
I wake a few hours later to find that Tris is already up and in the kitchen. I sit up on the couch and rub the sleep from my eyes. I turn back to look at her. "Hey," she says. I grin at her, getting up to join her. She pauses from cutting up carrots to stand on her toes to kiss me and I smile at her, brushing her loose hair behind her ears.
"Hey back," I say. She turns back and continues chopping. "You need some help?"
She nods at the potatoes. "Can you peel those for me."
I pull out a knife from the drawer and stand next to her, getting to work. "How are you feeling?"
She shrugs. "Better," she says. "It's the first time in a few days that I've actually rested. It was nice. You?"
"Same," I tell her, bumping her with my hip. When I finish, I toss the remains in the trash and set them in the pot, leaning against the counter to look at her. "Hey," I say. She turns back to look at me. "Are we going to be okay?"
The expression on her face softens and she puts the knife down to turn around, stepping in close to me. Taking my hands, she looks up at me. "I think so," she says. "I just...it was a great loss. And I know that we had just found out that I was pregnant, but it still sits with me."
"No, I know," I says. "I'm not trying to make it less than what it actually is."
She brings one of my hands up to her lips and kisses softly. "I want to find out what went wrong," she says. "I want to know if I can't in fact have children or of this was just because I had been shot. I don't want to cheat you out of anything."
"You aren't," I say. "If we can't have kids, then we can't have kids. It's not a make or break deal for me."
"But it should be," she says.
"Listen," I say pulling my hands from her and placing them on her cheeks, looking down intently into her eyes. "You're all that I care about right now. The fact that you're safe and healthy and alive, is all that I can ask for at his point. We'll deal with kids when we get to that point." She smiles at me and I lean in to press my lips to hers.
"Okay," she says, shaking her head at me slightly. "Love you."
"Love you," I say. She moves from me and tosses the carrots in with the potatoes. "You need help with anything else?"
She sets the chicken and top and covers with all with onions and broth before covering it. She turns on the fire and shakes her head. "Nope, now we just wait," she says with a grin. I follow her out to the living room and we sit on the couch again. She rests her head on my shoulder. "So this is home now?"
"Yeah," I say looking around the room. "I mean, there's still a few things that I need to bring over from Dauntless, but this is home."
I look down at her and she smiles. "I like the sound of that."
I kiss her head and rest against her. "So did the nurse back at Dauntless say anything of how this could have happened?"
She shakes her head. "She's Dauntless, not Erudite. She doesn't know any better," she sighs. "But I think it has something to do with me getting shot." She squeezes my arm. "I want to fix it," she says. "I want a family with you."
I close my eyes and press my lips to her head. "I know, baby," I tell her. She sniffs and then pulls back to look at me.
"I know we eventually have to go to Erudite to find our answers, but what I really want to know is why Dara would keep something like this from me. Especially something this important."
"Maybe she didn't know," I say. "It was still early in the pregnancy, there's a chance that everything looked okay."
She swallows and shakes her head. "We'll go back," she says. "Just...just not yet."
I nod. "We'll go whenever you're ready," I tell her. I don't want to push her into anything, especially not when I've just gotten her back. I've never been good at sensitive matters like these, that's part of the reason I know that I was never cut out for Amity. I'm not naturally kind, and it takes more effort to be kind than anything else for me. But with Tris, I know that I have to try with her because we've been through so much together that if I pretend to be anything else, she'll see right through me. She's the only person that I've bared my soul for; the only person who actually knows everything there is to know about me. The idea of being a father...it had changed me. Just hearing that heartbeat had altered something in me, that I knew that this was meant to be. I am supposed to be a father. And then we lost the baby and then it made me rethink everything. If it's meant to be then it'll happen. I can't force it to be any other way. I can't force anything, I know that now.
After dinner, Tris and I wash the dishes together, she washes and I dry. I figure the hot water and the soap will help ease her mind some and for me it makes me feel better knowing that she's within arms reach. I keep trying to tell myself that things are going to be okay again and that everything will be fine with us, but what she had said to me back at Dauntless, it stuck. I almost lost her back at the Bureau and I'm terrified of losing her again...losing her forever. I feel like if that ever happened I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I feel like I would lose everything and just give up. She has changed so much about me, that if I lost her, the fear that I would lose the things that she's helped me with, lingers in the depths of my mind.
When we finish, we head back over to the Prior house where I know that we're going to get chastised for just disappearing without telling them where we were going. I knock on the door and glance at Tris and make a face and she bites her lower lip. Caleb is the only family she has left, besides myself and Christina, but he's blood. The door opens and Caleb stares at the two of us, his eyes narrowed.
"Well I'm glad to see that you two are still alive," He says turning around and heading back into the house. I bite my cheek to keep myself from laughing as we follow him inside. Christina comes down the stairs and looks at the two of us.
"So have the two of you made up then?" she asks rolling her sleeves up and going to sit next to Caleb on the couch.
"Yeah," I say as we go over to sit across from them. "About this morning..."
"You're lucky that I had seen the two of you together," Caleb says.
"You did?" Tris sounds surprised.
"I heard voices and so I headed downstairs to look out the door," Caleb says. "Otherwise I wouldn't have known where you had gone.
"Wouldn't you just have assumed I was in bed sleeping?"
"Probably," he shrugs. "But today was the day I was going to try to force you out of your room. So I would have known."
"I'm sorry," I say. "I should have said something or left a note. But I wasn't even excepting her to open the door. It had just been you the past couple of days."
Tris looks at her brother. "That reminds me," she says, narrowing her eyes at her brother. "Why did you tell Tobias you should tell me that he had been showing up to check in on me?"
Caleb's eyes widen. "I was...I wasn't sure that you were ready to talk about him."
"Of course I was ready," she says. "Even if I didn't want to see him, I still wanted to know that he was looking out for me."
I look at her and she's watching my face for my reaction. I smile and she beams at me before looking back at the other pair. I understand where Caleb is coming from and my annoyance that he had lied to me wiped away with his explanation. I couldn't hold that against him, not after the state that Tris had been in.
"So are you guys still getting married?" Christina asks.
We all snap to look at her and that's when I remember the smart-mouthed transfer from Candor that had pissed me off the first day. "I wondered where you were hiding," I smirk. We laugh and she sticks her tongue out.
"Can you blame me?" she asks. "Two people that I care about were struggling and I want to make sure that everything is still okay with them."
"We're okay, Chris," Tris tells her. "I promise."
"And you're still definitely getting married?"
"Yeah," I say. "Why wouldn't we?"
She shrugs and shakes her head. "Just curious."
I squeeze Tris' hand and look over at Caleb. "We good?" I ask him.
He nods. "Yeah, we're good," he says. "No hard feelings, I was just looking out for my sister."
I shake my head. I don't need an explanation, because I understand where he was coming from. If the situations had been reversed I would have done the same thing. I would have looked out for Christina the same way. This is my family now. These are the people I know aren't going to bail. I don't know how long things will last with Evelyn or where that relationship will go. But for now, this is priority.
